


compromise

by kindreds



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt No Comfort, Implications of suicide, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-11
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-02-25 23:55:50
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 6
Words: 19,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21754114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kindreds/pseuds/kindreds
Summary: When all your friends are immortal super soldiers, death becomes background noise, like a muffled song in a different room or a symphony for a different crowd. Death was something Gabriel never concerned himself with until those he cared for fell into its cold, cruel grasp.Overwatch soldiers have a reputation for not being dead when they should be. You are no exception.
Relationships: Moira O'Deorain/Reader (kind of), Reaper | Gabriel Reyes/Reader
Comments: 4
Kudos: 95





	1. i.

**Author's Note:**

> supreme commander is a made up overwatch title that i created for the sake of self insertion & to sate my severe god complex. unfortunately not every high-ranking widely influential character gets plot armor (looking at you blizzard) and also i love angst and death and making my favorite fictional characters sad.
> 
> tags & rating will be updated as the story progresses.

On the dawn of the morning after her funeral, Gabriel Reyes takes a shower, pulls on his armor, and cooks breakfast.

He sits at the small wooden dining table in the nook of the kitchenette and pushes his food around on his plate. The snow falls idly outside. Across his seat, he observes the blue of an old army jacket that folds over her chair. She should be home from her morning routine in approximately six minutes, all sweaty and ugly from running around the base, hair plastered to her skin, asking for a bite of his breakfast while refusing to eat anything else afterward. She should be home right now. She should be sitting on her plastic chair on the other side of the table. She should have her feet propped up on his knees while she reads the morning news. She should be alive. But she isn’t.

It always did feel cold without her. Now it’s cold and spacious. The arms of her jacket puff out in her shape as if waiting for its owner to occupy its warm embrace. Her chair is pushed back, still in the same position she had left it. He feels the ghost of her presence everywhere. Winter falls over the base but the chill in his fingers doesn’t come from the outside.

Six minutes pass. She doesn’t come. Gabriel shovels a spoonful of greasy bacon into his mouth and gets ready for his day.

* * *

Morning drills pass by in uncharacteristic silence. Jesse looks at him with such an annoying pity in his eyes that Gabriel makes sure to give him extra work later. Even Genji, of all people, opts to be gentle with the silently grieving commander until they all recuperate from the shock of their loss. It’s his, above all; Gabriel Reyes was never open about his marriage, but their love was written in stone and on a stainless steel plaque underneath a portrait of their commemorative nuptial arrangement in the Hall of Heroes. They never had a formal wedding. Gabriel admits that it’s one of his biggest regrets.

Maybe one day he would visit the old church in New Mexico that his family used to frequent and marry her there. There had been stories of people marrying cars and towers and other inanimate objects. Would marrying a ghost really be any weirder?

* * *

Jesse comes to him on the roofdeck after lunch.

“Knew I’d find you here,” he says in an attempt to alleviate the tension that strings the air tight.

Gabriel stays quiet and lets the gentle breeze billow out the hood of his sweater. Jesse comes forward cautiously, as if approaching a wild animal, though whether the wild animal is timid like a deer or dangerous like a lion, he isn’t quite sure. Still, the method stays the same. He holds out a stick of Marlboro Red like a scrap of food, an offering of peace. Gabriel spares him a solid glance then returns to gazing at the pink sky as if he isn’t even there.

“C’mon, Commander.” Jesse takes out another and sticks it between his lips. “Just this once.”

“Cigarettes are contraband, agent.” Gabriel’s voice croaks as he strains to speak. “You shouldn’t even have those on hand in the first place.”

Jesse is pleased to get his commander to talk after a morning of uncomfortable silence. “Just one can’t hurt ya.”

“She got me to quit smoking the first time. She won’t be around to do it again.”

That gets Jesse to shut up. The world sinks into a state of saccharine divinity as the clouds part to reveal the golden sun, a blanket of light warming his cold cheeks. Gabriel shifts on his feet and the crunch of snow under his boots takes him back to reality. She’s dead. His wife is dead. He saw her body in the morgue, during the autopsy, under three tarps with her cold dead feet sticking out from the bottom in typical post-mortem fashion. He saw her casket be lowered into the ground at the now abandoned Overwatch base in Watchpoint: Zurich, Switzerland, where her body now serves as a memento of a bygone era. He sees her whenever he closes his eyes, and laments the fact that her death was something he couldn’t have prevented no matter what he could have done.

She was always destined for a glorious death. Gabriel just thought that it would be with his own, by his side.

“Go back to work, McCree,” Gabriel says firmly, his fingers squeezing each other tightly as he holds his hands behind his back.

The embers of Jesse’s shame melt into the snow as he turns around to take his leave.

“Yes, sir,” he murmurs, and leaves the commander to sit in his own melancholic rumination.

* * *

Gabriel visits the Supreme Commander’s office late into the night after the day’s responsibilities had been fulfilled. It quickly proves to be a mistake as he breaks down in tears when he catches the slightest whiff of the flowery perfume that continues to plague her workplace even in her absence.

He weeps in mournful pain, his heart seizing in his chest as he curls up into himself against the cold, steel door. Evidence of her life surrounds him like a miasmic cloud, a searing reminder of her once being alive but now gone, like her belongings had eyes that judged him for his every misgiving. There are still dog-eared documents and open books and a cup-half-empty of stewing coffee on the desk. She had been in the middle of signing off a funeral pension for a veteran Overwatch agent who had died peacefully in his home in New York. If only she’d been granted the same fate. Death by enemy hand will always net more valor than death by natural causes, but maybe he wouldn’t be mourning as much had she died of old age by his side instead.

Is it selfish? Of course it is. But a grieving husband is hard to console.

On the corner of her desk sits a single picture frame that houses an image of them engaged in a slow dance in a place that he recognizes to be the forest in Sweden where they took their “honeymoon” excursion. His own smile beams back at him through the glass and it takes all of Gabriel’s composure not to rip the photo into a thousand pieces because how _dare_ he be happy when the woman he once loved was dead? How _dare_ he hold her like that when he won’t be able to again anymore? How _dare_ he take her love for granted and regret it when it was too late?

His gloved fingers trail over the curve of her dress as if touching the photo could equate to touching her. She’s smiling, too.

This is the only photo of them he has left. She never was a big fan of getting her image taken, even if public appearances were a regular occurrence in her line of work. Photos of her still exist, but it’s always in a professional setting, with a fake smile brushed over and tweaked artificially, often accompanying news articles or crappy tabloids or gossip magazines, but _real_ photos of her just simply don’t exist. Except for this one.

Gabriel breaks open the frame and gingerly pulls the photo out. It’s the last trace of her that he can physically hold on to. It’s the only thing that will keep him from forgetting what her smile looked like when she was still alive.

He returns to their joint apartment and somehow still expects her to be sitting at the kitchen table engrossed in a bowl of cereal at 7 in the evening. The silence hurts. The cold hurts. The truth hurts.

The snow continues to fall outside. Through the window he views the winter landscape, a solemn serenity falling over the scene as if the world is granting him a moment of peace, of respite, of forgiveness. One of the worst things about the death of a loved one is the fact that time continues to pass without them, and that the universe doesn’t stop to let those close to them grieve. Overwatch will continue to operate without her guidance, though whether or not it will function the same way, he can’t be certain. Gabriel takes the photo from his pocket, gives it a long, hard look, and places it on the table.

Moonlight streams through the windows as he gets on his knees to repent. Gabriel isn’t a praying man. Gabriel is barely a man. His breaths come in labored heaves as he weeps over the kitchen table, nails digging deep into his knuckles as he begs the Lord to keep her safe, wherever she is, wherever she ends up. Gabriel prays that she enters Heaven, even if a nagging feeling in the back of his mind tells him otherwise. He prays enough to compensate for the years of religious neglect. He prays until he’s out of tears. He prays until he’s out of hope.

He leaves the photo on the table and lays down on the couch without taking his armor off. The bed might be too overwhelming, still. It probably still smells like her. Has her imprint. Has her warmth.

Sleep comes to him easily, surprisingly. The numbing cold lulls him into a slow, sinking slumber. He dreams of her.

* * *

Overwatch fell six months after you faked your death.

Morrison took over in your stead and very quickly proved to be capable enough to take charge but not enough to keep the company afloat the way you did — two of the most crucial skills the Overwatch leader needed to possess was the keen eye to spot corruption and the tenacity to nip it in the bud before it gets the opportunity to propagate, but Jack failed so horribly on both ends that had you actually died you would be rolling in your goddamn grave. Jack Morrison respected you enough to use his own title of Strike Commander; he said in an interview that he didn’t want to be known as “Supreme Commander Morrison” because there was really only one, and she was buried six feet underground with the memory of that title with her.

Jack was the country’s golden boy. People took to him so easily that the world forgot about you in a few short weeks. He was good, a real people person, but that was the problem. Jack Morrison was too lenient. He was too forgiving.

The first instance of his ineptitude came in the form of a hard-light engineer leaking the blueprints for the most recent prototype of a barrier that was being developed to aid the frontline of on-field operations. An opposing party had seen the documents and launched an attack on the barracks of a team of fourteen Overwatch soldiers in the warzone of Cairo, Egypt, striking while their defensive armaments were still in transit, in a time when they were left vulnerable with nothing but their standard pistols and knives to protect themselves with. Ten were left injured in the aftermath, three needing immediate unsupervised amputation due to toxins in the opponents’ weapons, and one dead before the captain could take them to the doctors’ tents that were located outside the city.

It wasn’t Jack’s fault entirely. Some people argued that his negligence was the root cause of the whole debacle, while others said that it was the engineer’s fault, and that Jack was innocent to have simply put his trust in a person that they _screened_ and _hired_ because God forbid that you have faith in your employees. One brave soul wrote in a blog post on his thousand-follower platform, that “This wouldn’t have happened if we still had the Supreme Commander spearheading the facility.”

The scandal sparked a nationwide debate that lasted a solid three weeks before it died down. An attempt on Jack’s life was made in a public forum the month after the incident in Egypt. Somehow, as you watched the news through the television in your beach home in the bays of remote Barbados, you felt like it was all your fault.

Doctor O’Deorain had helped you relocate after your “death”, and in turn you had helped her snag a seat on the inner council of the very organization you were killed by. The hard truth was that Talon had already been planning to ruin Overwatch by whatever means necessary because of her, because they wanted her, _needed_ her. Moira assured you on the night before the suicide mission that you were both doing this for the greater good, that Overwatch would live to see another day after it, that Gabriel would forgive you even if he spent the rest of his life believing that you were dead.

You liked to think she was right, at the time. A lot of things had been left unanswered, still.

Maybe a part of him already knew you weren’t coming back after the mission. Gabriel held you closer and kissed you harder that evening, and even after months, years of your supposed passing could you still feel the pressure of his touch on your skin. Sometimes it startles you when you feel the cool breeze on the evenings when you feel particularly lonely. It makes you miss him even more than you already do. It makes you wonder what _he_ feels. Of course, having to live knowing that your wife is dead is painful. But having to live knowing that the man you left behind thought you were, when you really weren’t, was even worse.

On one warm June afternoon, AZ News reported that Commander Gabriel Reyes was going to resign.

He made the public announcement dressed in the same formal regalia he had worn when he was awarded the honorary medal of bravery after the omnic crisis. Suit and tie always did look good on him. Reyes was a veteran, a decorated soldier, and if the medals that stippled his front weren’t enough indication, then the way he held himself and spoke at the podium should be.

You sat in front of the television and watched as his brown eyes peered into the camera. He wasn’t smiling. He never did in public. Not that he had any reason to anymore. It almost felt like he was looking directly at you, but there was no warmth, no comfort; only a sharp, searing pain and a twisting regret that forced you to shut the TV off and retire early for the night. It was too much to handle. You saw nothing in his eyes even through the high-quality screen. No joy, no anger, not even sadness. Just emptiness. An accurate reflection of what he’d been feeling these past long months — _nothing_.

A recording of his resignation speech was posted not long after, and it took all of your strength to muster up the courage to watch it. The video was a brief five minutes short, and you were surprised he stuck around for that long, if at all. His speech was a concise, no-nonsense parting goodbye directed toward the people he spent his time with in the company, mostly Jack and Ana, both of who sat on the front row of the crowd, leaving him alone on the stage. They would keep in touch, still, you were certain of it. Maybe that was why he seemed so relaxed with the whole situation.

Then he mentioned you and pinned you to be the reason he was leaving in the first place.

_I simply cannot work where I see her ghost in every corner I look. I get distracted. Critique and lambaste me as you might, but these working conditions are not optimal. I’ll go mad and I’ll take everyone with me. It’s better this way._

Your stomach was a mixing pot of emotions that brewed dangerously and threatened to spill out in the form of ugly tears. It was your fault. Everything was your fault. Gabriel was leaving and with him he took the last knot that kept the establishment from falling apart. You wanted to reach out and contact him again, tell him you were alive, that you could come back and rebuild what was lost, that you could be with him again, but Talon would kill you for real if word of your survival got out. It hurt to think that he was stepping down because of your absence. It seemed too odd for him to do so.

Strike Commander Morrison announced the disbandment of Overwatch exactly one week after Gabriel’s resignation. You wanted to say you were surprised. Most of the soldiers were transferred back into the US military to be used as dispensable assets for an ongoing war in a different country, but when the funding was cut entirely, the non-field employees had pretty much lost their jobs. The doctors, the engineers, the scientists, and everyone else who worked behind the scenes were given a meager grant by what was left of the funding pool and little else other than their dignity and the line “Worked in Overwatch” to pad their CVs. Some would find new jobs easily with such a prestigious honor on their résumés, but it would only be a matter of time before all the vacancies become occupied. The world could always use more heroes, but the world can only afford to employ so many of them.

Commander Amari was later reported to be dead a week later. She had been shot through her cybernetic eye, through the brain. Autopsy documents said that the bullet was handmade, making it impossible to trace the slug to its production source.

Strike Commander Morrison dropped off of the face of the earth completely. Given that he had no immediate family, it took a few weeks before people started to realize his truancy and suspect foul play.

Countries around the globe fell into a warring state shortly after. Overwatch was the face of peace, and without it the world lost its guiding light. It was like leaving a group of unsupervised delinquents in one room and waiting to see who kills who first. The biggest player in the game, however, was none other than Talon themselves.


	2. ii.

Justice is a cruel, fickle mistress. The world of law is a muddled gray where the rich come to reign and morals come to die. While the introduction of nanotechnology had heralded a new age of science and medicine, the realm of man’s hubris continues to grow despite the world finally pushing itself into a state of utopia. Greed begets greed. Crime rates had expectedly begun to grow exponentially after the disappearance of Overwatch, and without their constant vigilance, simply put, criminals had started getting bolder with their transgressions.

One particular case was one that you personally had to oversee during your stay in Barbados; a small-time criminal ring of what was known as “modern day pirates” had been spreading terror throughout the citizens of Bridgeport and it was only your nature to put a stop to it, even if you had to do it alone. What was a group of lowly criminals to that who was considered to be the hand of justice herself, after all?

Resorting to the threat of killing is crass and improper, but you brought your standard issue pistol along just in case. The mission was to seek and apprehend. Not to kill. The act of killing is an abuse of power, even if you don’t hold such authority anymore — the law enforcement code of conduct is embedded in your bones, and you’ll follow it no matter where you end up. Long gone were the glory days of doing this for valor or heroism. Being the image of bravery never was something you excelled at. Heavy is the head that wears the crown, but even underneath the weight of its burdens, the crown is at least nice to look at.

They recognized you when you came to them in their underground lair. It was almost funny how quickly they surrendered, but given that you were supposedly dead, you understood quickly how incredibly stupid it was to show your face in public without so much as a disguise to hide your identity. The scope of your influence was far greater than you realized. So you had to kill them.

You started going renegade after then, concealing your face under a homemade mask you had fashioned out of some old scrap material you found in the basement of your home. It was crude, but it was serviceable. Maybe you’ll look into some improvements with an old acquaintance who specializes in this sort of stuff in the future, but for now, this will do.

The night is young. You’re currently scoping out the base of a minor crime syndicate in the suburban neighborhood that lines the bays of Speightstown. Through the frosted glass of their window you see the shift of blurry figures as the home’s occupants go about their evening business, and for a moment you are reminded of the time you had spent an entire weekend in a two man stakeout mission with Gabriel in the slums of New York, New York. It wasn’t often that you volunteered for on-field operations, but it felt too cruel to send out anyone else when it was the festive season. Gabriel was just a colleague, back then. A subordinate that you considered your equal. He had no family to speak of to return to for the holidays. Neither did you.

People always said you two looked good together, and to this day it still astounds you how badly the general public fixates itself on the superficial. There is a certain degree at which one can remain silently complacent about the world and the conflict that wages within it, but when you start applying the same showbiz ideology on _soldiers_ , then, well. The illusion of peace often makes people turn a blind eye to war. Shallow activism starts when the city streets are safe but ends when Afghan children die. People are generous when there is a personal benefit to the cause. People are generous until another batch of boxes wrapped in white stars and red stripes gets shipped back home.

There will always be a reason for war. Maybe you’re just jaded. Maybe _you’re_ the delusional one.

A man pushes open the door and steps out into the cool evening breeze. He lets the air die down, looking to the trees and watching as the leaves rustle against the branches. You watch him as he sticks a cigarette between his lips. Through the lens of your military-grade binoculars, the smoke that puffs out of his nostrils is almost close enough to feel, to smell. It’s sickeningly voyeuristic. You can admit that it has been a long while since your last recon mission, and not being able to rush in and initiate combat makes your fingertips tingle with anxiety. The heartache is physical. There is an itch that you cannot scratch.

“Tony got the fuckin’ docs, can you believe that?” the man yells into his phone which he keeps wedged between his ear and shoulder as he pops open a canister that he had seemingly procured out of thin air. It sounds like he’s shouting directly into your brain. You adjust your earpiece to lower the microphone’s sensitivity.

You write down your notes on a small holographic screen that you have open next to you. Something about Tony finding the confidential documents of a big-name company and their plans of using the information to blackmail them into giving up a portion of their wealth, something, something; it’s all convoluted. They would have their heads on pikes displayed in town square for everyone to see before they could even breach the secure gates manned by an army of trained guards. You would know. You were the head of something similar once, too.

What went wrong in your two and a half decades’ worth of military service that you jumped from a comfortable office space to hiding in the foliage of a middle class neighborhood, spying on some small time criminals who had big dreams and bold aspirations? Your breath filters through the grates of your mask and the unexpected pressure causes it to fall onto the grassy soil just outside the border of the cherry bush you had been hiding in. The man notices. Your flight or fight response activates, but there is no hesitation in your bones and the answer comes quickly. To people like you, there is only one option. You are a soldier. There is nowhere to go but forward.

“Who’s there?” he chokes out, cigarette flapping comically against his lower lip. Turning to his phone, he murmurs quickly, “Yeah, give me a second here, Johnny. Sum’s come up. I’ll call you again later.”

You collapse the holographic screen with a small hand gesture and reach out from your hiding spot to pick up the mask you had dropped. There isn’t really a real escape from this situation; without the advanced tech from the old Overwatch base you’re pretty much stuck here until he finds you. So you do the most logical thing. You deal with the problem headfirst. He looks at you momentarily, squinting at you through the darkness and fighting against his own drunken stupor to comprehend his current situation.

“Wait,” he says, shaking his head as he plucks the cigarette from his mouth. “You’re… no, you can’t be… Aren’t you s’posed to be dead? What are you doin’ here?’ Are you… a ghost?”

Ghost. You can get used to that.

“‘Fraid not.” You pick your mask up and dust off some of the dirt that lines its grooves. “I’m something worse.”

The rush of battle ignites the gunpowder trail in your bloodstream and the euphoria of action gives you a washing sense of relief. You were worried that the stagnancy would turn your hand-to-hand combat skills rusty, but it’s an art that you’ve committed to memory, and so your body moves on its own when you lunge at him for the first strike. Fighting is a graceful dance that is different with every partner. Sometimes they move with you in an elegant engagement of equal skill. Sometimes they stumble over their own feet and step all over your toes. With the man whose only saving grace is a butterfly knife and the wifebeater on his back, the dance seems to be that of the latter.

One small tug of your middle finger and the hidden wrist-mounted blade underneath your sleeve pops out with a clean click. The simple pulley mechanic only works well with someone who doesn’t have an itchy trigger finger. War has hardened you. You feel no remorse when his eyes glint sadly as he pleads for you to let him go.

So you do. The mist in his eyes leads you to believe that he legitimately thinks he’s encountered an actual ghost. Maybe it’s better if it stays that way.

“You speak of this incident and I promise you will not see daylight again.” Pushing the blade back into its holster, it snaps back into place with another click. “Nothing happened here. You are dismissed.”

He hauls himself to his feet and hurriedly retreats into the house, the door slamming shut behind him as he does. The indoor lights are promptly turned off. Under the dim shade of the flickering street lamp, you see the glowing screen of his phone as it sits idly on the grass where he had dropped it in his haste to find shelter. It says that it’s 2:03 in the morning. You pick it up and stow it away in one of your many pockets before taking your leave.

* * *

Tony Gonzales and Brue Harrington are reported to be on trial for several accounts of espionage, perfidy, and theft the next morning with only a mobile phone boasting a cracked screen as evidence of their crimes. It was all the police needed, really. Amateurs tend to store all their information in one place. Beginners tend to do so unencrypted. It’s another level of stupidity and recklessness, however, when it’s on a freaking _phone_.

To be fair, they probably thought it was fine. And it was, for the most part, until a phantasmic entity came to ruin their plans. Better to stop evil at its roots than let it get the chance to grow. It’s a tried and true method of keeping an ecosystem clean from corruption, and you know it. You know it thoroughly. Trust is the fool’s fallacy. It’s easier to be transparently heartless than to risk your dignity picking up the pieces of a broken enterprise.

You watch the trial on the news as you snack on an old granola bar. The oats have hardened somewhat, but the taste is the same. Harrington, the man you had indirectly apprehended, stands in court. You feel kind of bad for them, but you remind yourself that it’s that sympathy that will turn you soft if you succumb to its bait.

What use does your stubbornness have anymore, though, when everything you had it for in the first place is gone?

Nervousness crawls in your skin as they announce the final verdict. Guilty on both parties. You shut the TV off and spend some time in the kitchen to reflect.

* * *

Empathy is a natural, intrinsic human trait. It takes a great amount of cruel effort to forget something so deeply weaved into the mind. You did it, once. Now it seems impossible to relearn.

You start by watching videos of rescued animals with appropriately inserted sad classical music playing in the background. A malformed baby pittie stumbles over his underdeveloped front legs and a kindly, elderly woman picks him up and cradles him gently as if he were her own. They named him Hope for his perseverance. You feel nothing, still.

Maybe something a little closer to home will work, you think as you pull up a compilation video of soldiers returning to their families. It only makes you sad. You think back on your own family and realize belatedly that you don’t actually have one.

Although, no — you _did_ have a family, back in Overwatch, but they were soldiers, too, people you used to see every day, people you were unashamed to admit you had been intimate with, people whose bonds you’ve formed with were stronger than blood. War was, _is_ , cruel to people like you, but you at least had the warmth of camaraderie to return to after the day was done. It was a privilege you continue to regret taking for granted. Opinions about you and the way you ruled were mixed; some people said you were too strict, that your iron fist was as hot as the coals you held it over, that the multiple layoffs Overwatch had seen over the twenty or so years you spent in the seat of power were a testament to how severely elitist the company was, that Overwatch wasn’t as open or as inclusive as the advertisements might have claimed. Others said that your austerity was what kept the place alive.

Overwatch wasn’t meant to fall after you left. It was a risk you were willing to take in the grand scheme of things, but it was a risk that ultimately ended up in the worst case scenario. Domino effect, butterfly effect, whatever you want to call it, and it all started with a slip up that you allowed to happen right under your nose.

You think about Gabriel and your stomach lurches. The old granola bar comes back up in chunks in the kitchen sink.

It’s only now that you realize how his resignation meant that you won’t be able to see him anymore. No media outlets are going to report on an old man just trying to live out the rest of his retirement in melancholic peace. Gabriel has no online connections. No family. You had lost your last tie to him with only the recording of his speech as his final words.

 _It’s better this way_. You feel like it was directed at you, somehow. Like a note you would find next to a pair of feet dangling six inches from the ground.

Over the past few weeks you had tried to imagine how Gabriel felt like when he found out you were dead. Now, you don’t have to imagine anymore.

A special kind of pain blooms in your chest and spreads through your body in a tingling, numbing sensation. Has he…? No. It’s not possible. He’s too headstrong for that, too stubborn. You’re briefly comforted by an old saying he used to tell you before he went on risky missions. _I can’t die_. He always said it with a grin. _It’s not my time_.

But _when_ was his time going to be? Gabriel had always been prideful of his super soldier blood, even if he was never outright vocal about it. It made him immortal. Even Doctor O’Deorain — God fucking have mercy on her, wherever she is — had called him out on his potency on more than one occasion during the experimental enhancement treatments that you personally had to oversee as both the Supreme Commander and Gabriel’s wife. He was basically immortal, but even gods weren’t immune to the influence of emotion. It was only a question of how they handled it that separated the good from the great.

Gabriel _has_ to be alive, still. You cannot fathom a world where he willingly brings down his demise upon himself. He’s too strong for that. He’s too strong. _He’s too strong_.

He’s not around to comfort you anymore. You’re not sure if you’ll ever see him again. As you sit on your stone-cold mattress looking up at the ceiling, the tapestry above you morphs into the faces of your loved ones, all twisted in frozen expressions of agony. Hands made of crackling drywall reach out to you, fingers curled with ill intent, but they stop short of your neck and crumble into dust. You choke on the debris. From the way things seem now, you might as well be truly dead. Drifting in and out of life, day in and day out. Who you were before is gone. Now you’re just its ghost.

You fall asleep to the sound of the ocean. The waves bubble happily at the shore when you look out of the window. A gentle gradient of baby blue to dusty pink lines the dusk sky. There is no peace here. The world isn’t safe anymore. You’ve failed everyone when all you were trying to do was help. Catharsis pierces you and the wound stings. Overwatch isn’t coming back and it’s all your fault.

* * *

A letter appears at your door the morning after. You feel renewed, but in a bad way. Like sleep stripped off what was left of your sanity and revealed the truth underneath it.

Several documents fall out of the envelope when you open it and drift to the floor like graceless feathers. At your feet you see your own face staring back at you through the shining gloss of a plain ID, but underneath it isn’t your own name. You pick it up to inspect it more carefully and notice that it isn’t your face at all, either. At least, not exactly. It still looks like you, just a little… different. A lot different.

 _AXH229-7882-281178_ , the letter starts. You recognize the uneasy scrawl even when it looks like it was written in a rush. A doctor’s handwriting may be bad, but a scientist’s is even worse.

_The anti-facial recognition device will be shipped to you shortly. It won’t alter your features permanently but it will last long enough for the flight to Antigua. We need to talk. You know who this is._

Another folded up piece of paper stays tucked into the envelope, and you can only assume it to be the plane ticket to the aforementioned location. Your fingers are as steady holding the letter as they are holding a gun. Doctor O’Deorain was never one to mince her words nor engage in needless dilly-dallying. Maybe you should be thankful for her bluntness. It saves you a lot of heartache.

The plan has been set in action. You turn the ID over in your fingers as you chew on another granola bar. Patience is necessary to carry out a task this monumental, and this time, you’ll be damned before you fail.


	3. iii.

As promised, the device Moira mentioned in the letter appears on the sandy platform of your doorstep a few hours later. It’s a lightweight little thing wrapped crudely in folds of bubble wrap, its beveled edges formed to look like a jewel. A small button on the side turns it on and you are immediately confronted by a simple screen with a keyboard so small you’re inclined to believe that it was meant to be a children’s toy.

 _Enter code,_ it tells you. You pull up the letter from Moira and type in the long string of supposedly randomly generated characters, which takes a bit of an effort on your part due to how tiny the keyboard and how long the code is. The device whirs for a second as it processes the information. Then the screen goes black. A flash of light blinds you and suddenly you’re looking into a high-definition camera that’s so crisp it almost feels like you’re looking into a mirror. On the overlay of the screen is an outline of a head and a line of text that reads _Frame face and hold the camera still for five seconds. Do not panic. You will feel a burning sensation._

You don’t question it. Warmth washes over your face as you hold up the device at eye level, but the comfort quickly gets replaced by the promised burn and it prickles at your skin like needles. They weren’t messing around when they made this thing. The device vibrates calmly in your hand as a laser scans over your features, and you soon realize that the prickling sensation isn’t at all akin to needles but instead a myriad tiny hands pushing madly at your skin. You watch your own face morph into something different, and soon you find yourself looking at the face of the person you saw on the ID. It’s still you, somehow. Everything else has changed but you still see the same sharpness that lines the dark rings around your irises. People can lie. But the eyes can’t.

The airplane ticket marks your flight to be in approximately seven hours. Unplanned trips were never your thing — unplanned _anything_ , really — everything that happened in Overwatch was the result of meticulous premeditation, and anything that happened off-schedule was... to be dealt with personally. You liked having an outline to follow throughout the week. Life after your death hasn’t been as consistent, especially since you don’t command an entire facility full of hundreds of trained professionals to do your every bidding anymore. Most things these days you just have to do on your own.

Although it’s still tender to the touch, you reach up and prod gently at your cheeks to try and feel the effects of the device on your skin. Some parts of the research done into the development of the Anti-facial recognition device (which the engineers called the AFR) was done in Overwatch a few months before its downfall, so it’s only fair that Moira used the information to finish it during her stay in Talon. For a moment you’re glad that something good has come out from the ashes of this entire fiasco. Then you remember the fiasco itself and you’re back to brooding over a jar of almost-expired strawberry jam.

Seven hours seem to stretch on forever when something so staggeringly crucial awaits you at the end of the day. All your bags were packed and the home was clean two hours after your facial modification session (though to be fair, you’re only bringing one carry-on that weighed less than a rifle and your house is barely fifteen steps big), and with five hours left before your flight, you decide to sit yourself down and rewatch Gabriel’s resignation speech to try and come to terms with what you believe is a permanent loss. You won’t allow yourself to hope that Moira has any idea of his whereabouts. You can’t. You shouldn’t.

God offers you a reality check in the form of a palpable guilt that twists your gut and pulls it out through your mouth. You feel the pain in your gums as his stoic face looks at you through your TV screen, but you can’t look away. Gabriel looks even more tired in the second rewatch, somehow, even if the recording is the same. He acts like he hasn’t smiled once his entire life. Another wave of nausea washes over your chest as you fail to remember what it looked like when he did.

_I’ll go mad and I’ll take everyone with me._

The tears sting against your sensitive skin, but your body refuses to process the sensation and you’re left with an empty feeling of numbness. You’re not sure if you’re still even conscious.

_It’s better this way._

* * *

The baggage clerk gives you a weird look and you muster up the nicest smile you can manage while suffering from physical, emotional, and spiritual fatigue. Any sensible person could see past your very thin and very obvious facade, but the kid only gives you a tired onceover before giving you the go signal to leave. Maybe Moira planned a late night flight for this exact reason. You wouldn’t put it past her.

Travel time from Barbados to Antigua is estimated to be about an hour and a half, and that’s an hour and a half of your life you’re looking to spend asleep. You soon find yourself in economy sandwiched between a balding white man who smells pungently of mayonnaise and a powered-off omnic resting in her seat wrapped in a little red blanket. Moira should be making the big bucks in Talon right now with how influential she is; God fucking knows how much you’ve sacrificed to get her there — would it have really made a dent in her bank account had she booked you a seat in first class instead?

It’s just an hour and a half long flight. You shouldn’t complain. Strapping yourself in, you let the cool air calm your senses as you close your eyes and try your best to sleep. Above, the smoky white wisps of smoke from the air vents turn into dark tendrils just before rest consumes you. Your subconscious tells you it’s nothing, and for a long while you forget about it. However, you dream of it again and you wake up momentarily just to ponder on your own confusion. The border between sleep and waking blurs when you’re on the plane. Baldy at the window seat snores happily as you look up to confirm your suspicions, but the lights are off and there is no black smoke in the shape of cirrus clouds in sight.

Sleep takes you again, albeit in an unconscious effort. It’s like your body knocked you out and told you to take a breather because _you’re not freaking immortal_. A soldier, sure, you’re far more durable than the average person, but you’re human nonetheless. Maybe you should ask Moira for one of those steroidal treatments she used to give Gabriel back in Overwatch. Maybe then you wouldn’t pass out on the next plane you get on.

Nighttime Antigua is a refreshing sight even when you have to view it through a tiny airplane window behind the ugly mug of a white man who now magically smells like stale soda. City lights from thirty thousand feet in the air always look nice in the dark. It feels good to be away from them, viewing life from afar like a quiet spectator instead of an active participant. It’s how it feels sometimes, really, and it’s in those moments of dissociation where you feel the most peace; as much peace as one can have with how much burden they have piling on their shoulders, at least. Just like how sometimes you look into a mirror and your mind fails to register that you’re looking at your own reflection. A stranger in her own home. A stranger in her own body.

That’s what you’d like to be forever. A nobody. You’ve gone through so many lifetimes being _someone_ that your only desire now is to be no one.

Too bad that won’t be happening for a while, if ever at all. You still have a mission to carry out, and you’ll be Supreme Commander of a Fallen Empire until you finish the task at hand. Your duty is to the people. It always has been, and it always will be.

The assignment starts with Moira, who you’re supposed to meet in a little 24-hour pub along the coast of one of Antigua’s many gorgeous beaches. You take the bus, because she didn’t plan ahead far enough to give you any vehicular accommodations, and make the long walk there at 2:30 in the morning. On your wrist, the comfort of safety lies in your hidden blade. If anyone tries to do you funny, you’ll at least have the capacity to fight back. You’re lucky that your skillset doesn’t limit you to boring council meetings and court hearings and cold offices. In no way are you capable of being on the _actual_ battlefield, but your track record boasts a good six-win advantage over Gabriel during your sparring sessions back in the Switzerland base. The first two instances were a result of him feigning weakness only for you to overpower him. The rest were just your own strength alone.

You spot the familiar sweep of Moira’s auburn hair behind the frosted logo of the establishment’s glass windows. A poster on the front advertises their new Hawaiian Burger, which is just a regular burger but with a pineapple slice in it. Not chunks or anything. A whole slice of a cored pineapple. It seems that it’s the item on her plate when you walk in.

The pub is mostly empty but the air remains warm from the ambient lights that surround the bar. Moira looks up at the chime of the bell but doesn’t turn to look.

“Welcome to Antigua, agent,” she says bluntly, lacing her clawed fingers together.

“You’re speaking to me like I’m not your superior.” Your voice cracks embarrassingly when you speak. Literal months of silence can do that to you.

“You’re not. Not anymore.”

Her words knock the air out of your lungs. Moira’s right, as much as you hate to admit it. You aren’t her superior, nor are you anyone’s. Not anymore.

You slide into the stool next to her and pull your hood up and over your head. “You could have at least gotten me a car or something. I had to take the bus and walk thirty minutes just to get here.”

“I needed you to be as discreet as possible.”

“Is that why put me in economy class, too?” Moira sneers as you grab a menu and pore over the list. Being Supreme Commander has spoiled you and she knows it.

“My apologies. I’m afraid lending you a private jet is not in my agenda.” She takes a swig from her glass of watered-down whiskey. “And putting you in first class would stroke your ego too much.”

“Thanks,” you answer sarcastically. A particularly vibrant sandwich full of _adobo_ flakes and drizzled with barbecue sauce catches your eye. Moira notices and pauses before reaching over to flatten the menu in your hands onto the counter of the bar.

“My treat,” she says defeatedly when you shoot her a questioning glance. “For not putting you in first class, apparently.”

You smirk. “I still have access to my card, you know. Put it under my sister’s name.”

“Sister?” Moira asks incredulously after she orders the sandwich. “I never knew you had one. Or any family at all, really.”

“Used to.” An awkward silence falls on the conversation as the muffled bass of a vintage pop song fills in the background. “We were twins. She died before my papa had a chance to even meet her.”

Moira’s quiet for a moment but the crackle and pop of frying meat keeps you distracted from her silence. Through the little window between the kitchen and the bar you watch as a chef toasts some buttered buns on a skillet whose handle is blotted with patches of dried oil as evidence of years of usage. The whole place is terrifyingly vintage but in a very wholesome and homey way with its gentle orange lighting and decorative trinkets native to the island. Moira almost looks out of place from how modern she looks, from the inconspicuous tubes attached to the veins in her wrist to her mismatched eyes that look at you from behind the stray locks of her fiery hair.

“As much as I am curious, I think it’s rude to pry any further,” she says while looking at you. A sharp fingernail pierces the solid golden crust of her burger and sinks into the spongy bread inside. You feel the same sensation with her eyes.

It’s almost too much to handle. “I appreciate that.”

Her gaze tears away from yours and silence drapes over the scene again as you wait for your food to be served. It’s not awkward this time, but not that comfortable, either. The bartender pushes her way through the bead curtain with your meal on a porcelain plate, and you welcome the diversion with open arms.

“So you said you really needed to talk to me about something?” you ask through a mouthful of deliciously crunchy meat. “Shame. I was enjoying the inert life. Really gives you a new perspective on things.”

Moira shushes you with a subtle shake of her head. “Not here.”

You eye the CCTV above the bar as you take another bite of your burger. “Got it.”

“I’ll let you finish that and I’ll take you elsewhere. We have a few things to discuss.”

Laughing, you wipe away the sauce on the corner of your lip with a paper towel. “At least you bought me dinner first, I’ll give you that.”

For a moment a smile graces Moira’s thin lips and the air seems to get a little lighter. You eat your meal in silence while Moira’s remains sitting on her plate. The bartender polishes up the counter and gestures towards it with her thumb.

As respectfully as she can, she asks, “Do you want to get that to-go?”

Moira locks her fingers together again and nods her head politely. “I would appreciate that. Thank you.”

The kindness seems to catch the bartender off guard and you find yourself feeling the same. Moira had never been nice to anyone while she was working in Blackwatch, and just the sight of her smiling without a trace of malice is enough to bring you to the realization that things have, in fact, changed. Maybe for the better, even. She seems happy to be in Talon. A little too happy.

You wipe your hands on your pants and stretch, the bones of your back popping as you do. “I’m good. Where are you taking me tonight, Doctor? I need to give you kudos, at least you didn’t take me to a seedy bar for our first date.”

“This wasn’t a date. Aren’t you married?”

A tingling numbness crawls on the back of your head and your dinner threatens to spill back onto your plate. You didn’t expect Moira to bring it up so casually, but you can’t blame her. She doesn’t know what you’ve been through these past few months. You think she’ll figure it out on her own in due time.

“Right,” you say sheepishly, scratching at your cheek as you slide off of your stool. Moira follows and leads you outside where she had parked her motorcycle along the wooden railing of the pub.

“I’ve only one helmet, but the hotel isn’t too far off from here.” You watch her as she pulls on her coat; a little too thick for a place as tropical as Antigua, and balk at her when she offers you the headgear. “Come on. I brought you all the way here. Not going to lose you now.”

You exhale through your nose and accept your fate. It fits snugly around your head, at least. “I trust you’ll get me there safe, anyway. Never knew they had motorcycle rentals here.”

She tenses momentarily when you hold her at the waist, but relaxes once her hands are on the handlebars. “Belongs to one of the locals, actually. I’m not a fan of renting, I prefer _owning_ things. So I bought it. Gave the lad enough money to buy him five more of these, if he ever so desires. Just wasn’t in the mood to find a shop so far away from the city.”

“But you were in the mood to wait how long for me in that pub?” The wind howls against your ears and you are thankful that Moira’s hair is so short, else you’d have a mouthful of her auburn locks. “And _renting_ a hotel room?”

“Some good four, five or so hours. And I’d no choice, it was the hotel or I drop a few thousand grand for a dinky little home along the sea.” She makes a sharp left, but her impeccable balance keeps you on the road. You feel safe with her at the wheel. “You might think I’m lax with my finances, but even _I_ can’t fathom dropping that much for a one-night stay.”

“One night? You taking me somewhere else come morning?” Laughing, you decide to get a little closer, pressing your chest lightly against her back. Moira’s shoulders tense up again but it stays like that this time.

“Yes. We’ll spend the morning there, then we’ll leave by noon,” she says simply as she slows to a stroll when you reach the hotel. _The Golden Trout_ , it says in bright, glowing letters above the nest of canopies that line the outside gardens. You didn’t expect to find a place so visually noisy in the middle of the night. Just one little misstep and you might run face-first into a casino.

You follow her into the lobby where she presents her paperwork to the clerk behind the counter. When she asks for yours, you take a good look at the card first before sliding it onto the smooth marble. The name seems familiar, but you can’t quite place why.

The room is as lavish as you expect it to be, but fatigue overcomes your body so intensely that you neglect to appreciate any of its glamor. Any except the comfort of the plush linen sheets that cover the soft mattress, at least. It’s no Egyptian cotton, but it’s better than whatever the hell you’d been sleeping on back in Barbados for the past half year. Compared to this, it might as well have been made of cobblestone.

“You’re free to sleep a few hours. I must attend to a few matters.” Moira shrugs her coat off and hangs it up on one of the pegs behind the door. “If you’re not up by 6, I’ll wake you up.”

“Thanks, Moira.” You block out your train of thought and sink into the pillows, the blankets, and the soft duvet. “Night.”

She says nothing else, but you see her look pensively over you before sleep takes you once more.


	4. iv.

Tomorrow comes abruptly and the sun greets you with a harsh hello that filters through your lashes and sends glowing fractals dancing in your vision with every blink. The clock on the bedside table says it’s half past 7. A strange chill crawls in the room as the window curtains billow out with the breeze. Moira sits with her legs crossed at the vanity dresser, nursing a morning sangria and scrolling through the news on a raised holopad when you leverage yourself on your elbows and blink the sleep from your eyes.

“I thought,” you slur, instinctively patting down the crazed nest of hair that had formed atop your head overnight. “You’d wake me up by six.”

Moira downs the rest of her drink and loosens her collar. “I was going to,” she says, rising from the stiff linen stool that slots neatly into the vanity dresser. “But you looked so peaceful in your sleep that I’d feel bad if I did.”

“Noble.” You yawn and stretch, wiping the tears that form on your lashes. Moira crosses the room to deposit her empty glass in the kitchen sink. The room gradually begins to warm.

“But now that you  _ are _ awake, I’d like to start discussing the things I believe you’ll find to be… important.” She lays down a plate of warm dinner rolls on the bed as you sit up properly with the sheets curling around you in folding waves. The sting of a developing migraine shoots up your spine and pierces needles into your brain, but Moira gives no reaction as you wince and rub your temples.

“Give me like, two minutes,” you grunt through the agony. You’re no stranger to migraines, but the pain it puts you through is still one of the worst you’ve ever experienced. It just hits different from bodily injury. You can still work through a gunshot wound or a broken bone or a cigarette burn, but a migraine renders you completely incapacitated because the pain is the only thing you’re allowed to concentrate on.

Moira is half-shrouded in the corner of the room and you feel her eyes watching you through the darkness. There always has been something eerily sinister about her and her skewed morals, and often you wonder how Gabriel put up with her for all those years. Despite being the person responsible for most of the executive decisions that occurred during the long decades of Overwatch’s glory days, you had absolutely no agency over what happened in Blackwatch, nor did you have any say in how they were meant to operate — that was Gabriel’s job, and it was a job he did exceptionally well. They were an annex of the main branch, that enough is true, but in order to maintain the integrity Overwatch had striven and worked so hard to obtain, you had to dissociate as much of the black ops from the primary ops — one little scandal, one little white lie was all it took to bring both circles down.

There is blood crusting under her fingernails. The doctor’s sharp eyes are void of emotion, of light. Gabriel wasn’t the first victim of her cruel experimentation, in all honesty he was far from it. You remember having to issue an apology for every family who had lost their sons or daughters on the battlefield but with no body available to return home. You remember listing off the reason as a scarcely believable lie, like  _ Their body was mutilated beyond salvation, _ or  _ Their body remains incomplete due to missing limbs, _ or  _ Their body could not be recovered amongst the debris _ , when in reality their corpses were being taken to Doctor O’Deorain’s underground laboratory to be used as vessels for her continued exploratory research into the very fragile uncharted waters of eternal life.

_ To understand immortality, one must first brave death.  _ The rotting veins that crawl along her arm are a direct indication of her own cruelty. An unlocked drawer. A Talon agent. A missing file. The final months of Overwatch as you knew it were a blur of hasty meetings and clandestine briberies and promises to an organization that took no prisoners. They wanted her, the doctor with the mismatched eyes, as they had tagged her, in exchange for the information they had yoinked from right under your goddamn nose, but Talon wasn’t satisfied with only stealing one of the brightest scientists the world had birthed, no; they wanted  _ you _ dead. To kill Overwatch in all its entirety. To kill hope.

“I’ve recently caught wind about the current state of Jack Morrison,” Moira says, interrupting your train of thought. It irks you somewhat how she talks about him like he’s an object, or a distant memory, but you hold your tongue and listen intently. As much as you disliked Jack and his methods and the way people praised him blindly as if he were some sort of God-given, heaven-sent martyr of a nobler time, he was still your colleague, and more importantly, he was still your friend. Dead or alive or anywhere in between.

She continues; “Our agents had sighted him residing at a hotel in Moscow a few days ago.” Reaching into an envelope conveniently placed on the dresser, Moira pulls out a handful of photos and fans them out on the foot of the bed, just close enough for you to see. “We’ve identified him successfully, but I think you’d appreciate seeing the pictures yourself.”

Like any candid photo taken in a haste of time and a blur of secrecy, the photos of Jack are those of him walking in a crowd or crossing a street while looking awfully, suspiciously alive for a man who was thought to be dead. Though  _ dead _ isn’t quite the correct term; Jack had only gone MIA after the disbandment of Overwatch, and no one gave it any thought because the world assumed that he’d simply gone into retirement. You know better. Soldiers don’t retire. War calls them back, and they’ll answer every time. That you know personally.

“Was he alone?” you ask, looking up at Moira. She nods curtly, the furrow of her brow quirking with sadness.

“Afraid so. If you’re about to ask about Commander Amari, she-”

You cut her off with a raised hand and a shake of your head. “I get it,” you say after a brief pause of contemplation.

“Commander Amari died via gunshot wound through her cybernetic eye,” she continues anyway. Her expression is one that you don’t quite know how to place, though loosely you would say that it’s something between willful sorrow and deep regret. “A member of the inner council called for her termination. One of our snipers carried out the job.”

A faint sense of betrayal hooks into your gut and the numbing feeling comes back to crawl up the skin of your ears and the pads of your soles. The white noise of disbelief blocks out your thoughts. Your veins pulse angrily with the harsh rush of blood. You can’t even hear yourself in your head.

“You-” you start, breathing heavily. Your chest heaves with every inhale, contracts shakily with every exhale. The sheets around you grow cold instantaneously. “You  _ killed _ Ana?”

“I had no say in the decision. You have to know that.” In the stillness of silence, her hand shakes like her bones are the epicenter of an earthquake. Long nails don’t look good on her, you think.

“You killed her.” An incredulous laugh bubbles up in your chest. “You killed Ana. You didn’t even try to stop them.”

“I  _ did _ ,” she hisses, the malice in her eyes sharpening the darkness of her pupils. “But they threw me under the bus. I don’t have much influence over the council quite yet.”

It’s too late to grieve. You take a few deep breaths and calm yourself, smoothing your hands over your face as you try not to let the news of Ana’s death get to you.

This is war. The first casualty of many.

“Fine,” you say, mainly to yourself in an effort to still the vitriolic waters of your unease. You’re not even going to ask when it happened or try to pry for any more details about her assassination. All it’s going to do is agitate you even further. “It’s fine.”

Moira pauses for a moment to let you simmer down. You feel yourself deflate just as her hand stops shaking. With a brief cough to clear her throat, she gathers the photos and stows them back into her plastic filing envelope. “Let’s… forget about that, for now.”

“I’ll do my best,” you murmur.

“I will allow you to look at the pictures at your own time again, but this information is highly confidential. I would appreciate it if you didn’t go around spreading Morrison’s current state to everyone you meet.”

She’s speaking to you like you’re some sort of amateur. You’ve been in the industry for well over two-thirds of your life. It’s safe to say you know a thing or two about confidentiality.

“I’m aware,” you tell her. “But… what now? We know about Jack. What does he have to do with anything? What do  _ I _ have to do with anything? Need I remind you that Overwatch is  _ dead _ , Moira?”

Silence blankets the room like the snow on a cold December evening. There’s no trace of emotion on Moira’s face, but the darkness in her lidded eyes tells you everything you need to know. It’s hard to read someone when they’re concealed in shadow, but it’s even harder when the noise of quietness distracts you, takes away from the concentration by filling your head with flashes of numbing stillness. You’re still not sure how to feel about the whole situation. Knowing Jack’s alive, that Ana’s dead… it’s too much information to process that the feeling is akin to trying to shred rocks with a cheese grater.

A nagging thought pulls at your subconscious in the back of your mind that tells you that this circle is still incomplete. There’s Jack, there’s Ana, but…

“Gabriel?” you ask. His name is familiar on the tongue, but it’s odd to hear being said out loud. “What about Gabriel?”

Moira shifts in the darkness. “I’ve no information on him.”

You scoff. “You’re lying. You got your fancy Talon equipment to locate Jack, why couldn’t you have done the same for Gabriel?” A burning annoyance lights up your already growing agitation. “That’s my husband, Moira. The least you could do for me after all I’ve done for you is keep tabs on him.”

“I wasn’t aware that I owe you a favor.”

Her words bite. You bite back. “It’s not a favor. I explicitly asked you before the mission to keep an eye on him.”

Moira sighs, shaking her head and averting her gaze as if she’s one shred of sanity from snapping. “Gabriel disappeared without a trace after his resignation. Our agents haven’t been able to track him down since.”

“And you’ve decided to only tell me this  _ now _ ?” Your voice grows shrill. The bread on the covers begins to cool.

“It never came up.”

“I asked for one thing, Moira. One thing!” You hang your head in your hands and let the warmth of your own frantic breaths soothe the cold anxiety that sears pinpricks into your chest. “ _It never came up_. I’d laugh if I could.”

Another bout of silence sinks the room into an absolute vacuum, sucking the air out of your chest and blotting out all sensations except for the tightness that continues to constrict in your chest. Moira’s speaking again, but you can’t hear her through the harsh noise that overwhelms your hearing. Everything feels cold, shapeless; are you crying? Are they tears? Are you frustrated, mad, upset, or a combination of all three? You can’t tell. You can’t tell. You can’t tell.

It takes you a few minutes to come back down from the high of your episode. Tacky dried-down tears coat your cheeks and you wipe your face on the bedsheets with a sniffle.

“I’m sorry.” Her accent blends her words but the sentiment is genuine. Quietly she returns to her seat at the vanity table and smooths a hand over her face. “I should have told you sooner. We had to wait a few weeks to confirm his total absence. Even then, we can’t be completely sure that he’s dead.” The word cuts deep. “It’s still possible that he’s simply in hiding, or operating as a vigilante like Morrison.”

The Supreme Commander inside you wants to bark orders and demand Gabriel’s immediate safe recovery, but the thread-thin pull of your diplomacy keeps you grounded just enough to restrain you from fully chastising Moira and her subjectively poor decisions. You nod, mostly to yourself, and look up at the ceiling as if God Himself would reach out and take you home.

“Keep looking,” you say calmly, quietly, dangerously. “We don’t want to just let him go without supervision. Gabriel is more dangerous alone than when he isn’t.”

“Understood.” Moira pulls on her sleeve to check her watch. “We must leave soon. Our flight is in an hour.”

“Flight?” you ask curiously. You’re not too upset about the sudden plans. It’s just like you’d done a stopover at Antigua, and a refreshing one at that. As similar as it is to Barbados, the comfort of a proper bed beats what you started calling home.

“I did say I’d be taking you elsewhere.”

“And where would that be?”

Moira smiles a humorless smile. “Rialto. I’m taking you to Talon.”


	5. v.

The complimentary breakfast scone and all-too-sweet coffee that the airline provides serve as a momentary but rather effective band-aid solution to the wounds of what happened that morning. Moira had refused to eat or drink anything that isn’t vegan or gluten-free or alcoholic and had given you her share of the rations. Two scones and two coffees in an airplane to Venice isn’t how you expected to spend the weekend, but you find as you settle into the plush leather of first class that you’d be a fool to start complaining. Perhaps nine hours in a tube speeding Mach Five through the air isn’t going to be so bad with how much leg room you have. It certainly trumps having to sit next to the human equivalent of sewage water, as you had done just yesterday.

“We’re to meet with an acquaintance before I take you there,” Moira whispers to you two hours into the flight. You’re not sure if announcing the itinerary in vague, almost cryptic chunks is how she intended to relay information to you, but with your hunger sated and spirit refreshed, you’re not in a sour enough mood to call her out on it.

One of her gloved hands finds yours and gives you a reassuring pat. She’d taken off her acrylic nails at the hotel and it almost feels awkward to look at her without them, as if she’s bare, naked, even under the dark velveteen cloth that hugs her fingers warmly or her faux leather coat or her dark washed jeans. Her palm is warm on the back of your hand. You can’t tell if it’s the degenerating veins or her natural body heat that causes it.

“Am I allowed to ask who this acquaintance is?” you whisper back, shifting slightly in your seat to get a better angle. “Or is that another confidential piece of information?”

“The latter,” answers Moira, unamused. “Get some rest. You’re going to need it.”

You huff, sinking deeper into your seat as a dolled-up flight attendant serves you a glittering golden mimosa. Her movements are small but fluid as she reaches over to hand Moira her drink, and you find yourself shamelessly ogling at her skin and how it almost seems to glow under the artificial lights. It’s odd seeing someone in the airline industry who isn’t an omnic. Most jobs in this line of work are better suited for a cybernetic mind than an organic one, as service is what omnics were created for, and precision in something so crucially precise as flying is necessary. Omnics had overtaken humans in employment rate - and for what? Do omnics require shelter for their waterproof framework? Do they have bodies vulnerable to sickness, to old age? Do they go hungry? Do they die?

Omnics have rights, that much is certain, but no matter how much one tries to polish and hone an omnic’s algorithm to perfectly emulate the human’s behavioral patterns or cover them in synthetic skin or even simulate emotion to an almost uncanny degree, it would be years, centuries, before they’ll be able to possess natural creativity through the process of self-learning. After all, what is art but a combined effort of mistakes, and who would make a robot with intentional faults?

Do omnics want? Do they desire? Do they yearn?

The flight attendant smiles at you with her honey brown eyes and you feel your cheeks heat up. You’re touch starved, but you keep it civil. With the possibility of Gabriel still being alive, it would be nigh immoral to commit an act of infidelity against a man who still thinks you’re dead. That’s like a double sin. God would smite you from the high heavens if He could.

“Can I get you anything else?” she asks. Her sweet singsong voice soothes you a lot more than you have the pride to admit. After serving so long as Overwatch’s mother figure, it feels nice to be babied sometimes. “We have a selection of gourmet lunches for you this afternoon.”

“I’m - I’m good,” you stammer, positioning your hair over your ears to hide your embarrassment. “Maybe later. Thanks.”

How did you become such a freaking beta?

Thankfully, gracefully, like an angel of deus ex machina, Moira pipes in. “Do you still have the steamed asparagus?”

The flight attendant directs her attention towards her, away from you, the long false lashes on her eyes fluttering when she blinks and nods enthusiastically (it’s fake, like her lashes). “Yes, ma’am. Would you like the honey gl-”

“Just keep them plain. Oh, and-” She holds out her glass and offers one of her patented nauseating smiles. “Another mimosa, please. Hold the garnish. Thanks.”

Wordlessly, the flight attendant takes the glass and leaves with a polite bow. Moira sits back, pulling a purple crocheted blanket over her lap as she peers out of the window. _SkyHum_ , the tag on it reads. _Sponsored by the United Nations_. You laugh bitterly to yourself and ignore Moira’s questioning look with a resigned, unenthused shake of your head.

* * *

You’re asleep when the plane lands. The abruptness of waking is rattling, disorienting, body shaking as the rush of sleep-drenaline courses through you. Your heart feels heavy in your chest as if you’ve been hollowed out and left as nothing but a shell to house your guilt and burden. No organs. Just your soul and its broken spirit.

“Wake up,” you hear Moira’s voice through the smog of your fogged up subconscious. “We’ve landed.”

Yawning, you stretch and rub the sleep out of your eyes. “Good morning to you, too, I guess.”

“It’s six PM.” A symphony of unfastening seatbelts fills the small, compact vehicle.

“Ugh, always annoys me when people do that before the light turns off,” you say, just quietly enough that the other passengers hopefully don’t hear. “Like, sit down! The plane’s not going anywhere.”

“Right,” Moira says while she undoes her seatbelt.

“Can you at least tell me where we’re going?” you ask. With how she’s been treating you so far you almost feel like you’re being held hostage, except willingly. “It’d make me feel a little better to know where I’m going to be sticking my head in. Can never be too sure, next thing I know I might have a knife at my throat-”

“Shut up. People can hear you.” The doctor folds her blanket and tucks it into the basket at her feet, slotting it in with the outdated airline magazines from seven months ago. An illustrated guide for flying safety peeks out from over its weaved exterior.

“I’m _joking,_ ” you say back.

Moira, still clearly unamused, shakes her head and leans back into her seat as the plane makes its turnaround on the landing. Outside, the dusk sky is stippled with clouds illuminated by the glow of the moon, but the pollution of light creates a mask over the stars that twinkle weakly behind their smoky facade. It’s odd to see a country as advanced as Italy with no pollutant reduction programs in place, but you decide not to question it. Maybe you’ll take it up with their council when you get the chance. If you get the chance.

You probably won’t.

The plane comes to a halt and the overhead lights shut off. You take this as your cue to get up and leave.

* * *

“Here,” Moira says as she hands over a gray silk scarf, a cotton face mask, and a pair of tinted sunglasses. “Put them on. AFR is starting to wear off.”

You do as she says in the quiet, chilly bathroom of Venice Marco Polo Airport. On a plaque fixed onto the wall next to the mirror, a few lines of a poem in a language you don’t understand decorates the otherwise bland restroom. The mirror itself is fogged over by the accumulative condensation of a thousand passers-by, and through the mist of its surface you see yourself again without the temporary skin-deep mask, without the makeup, without the bells and whistles of what was expected from Overwatch’s notorious Supreme Commander. No longer do you hold that title, you remind yourself again. Now you’re just you. Nothing more than a civilian with hidden baggage.

Tony Gonzales and Brue Harrington haunt your subconscious as you wrap the scarf around your neck. You try your best not to think too much about them and the horrid fuckup you’d made that got them in jail in the first place. Recon missions always were boring. You were bound to make a mistake like that sooner or later.

It probably wouldn’t have happened if you had Gabriel with you. He always kept you in check. From how much influence he had over your decisions, he might as well have been running Overwatch himself with you only acting as his puppet. You were qualified for the position, of course; you wouldn’t take on a job that was out of your field, and neither would Gabriel approve of something that could sabotage the empire he’d suffered so much to help build — but qualifications can only go so far. It’s the performance that creates reputation. A significant part of yours was a result of his guidance, and without him you’re basically just another soldier who just happens to have a meticulously polished sense of diplomacy.

These days you often find yourself asking; What would Gabriel do? All those years of letting him make your decisions for you must have had _some_ sort of effect on your own judgment, right?

 _You have to start taking better care of yourself_ , the Gabriel in your memory tells you. You see his ghost in the mirror, in the swirls of the fog. _God knows what’ll happen to me if I lose you_.

You find yourself lost in thought and decide you should go back. There’s a lot ahead of you. It’s unwise to start filling your head with delusions now.

* * *

“You’ve been quiet,” Moira muses from behind the folds of an Italian tabloid. A poorly photoshopped image of what you can only assume is a local celebrity covers the front and the headline screams at you in a bold, alarmingly red font, but you don’t understand what it says. You never took Moira as one to waste her time on drivel like this.

“Just,” you begin, but shake your head. The dark windows of her private vehicle prevent you from seeing too much of the evening streets and where you’re going, but it’s not like you’d know, or at this point, care. “Nothing.”

Her eyes look at you from over the edge of the paper and you try your hardest not to feel too vulnerable in her scrutiny. It’s not fun being constantly psychoanalyzed. Too much pressure for something so innocuous as simple observation.

“We’re almost there,” she tells you, lowering her tabloid paper. For a fleeting moment you almost think she’s feeling some semblance of empathy for you with the subtle quirk of her brow and the small, almost imperceptible smile, but you know better than to think as much.

Moira reaches under her seat and pulls out a suitcase that she promptly opens to reveal a small array of weapons sufficient enough to arm a three-man squad. The shredding sound of velcro sounds like a storm in the silence as she retrieves a standard .45 caliber pistol and offers it to you.

“You know how to handle a gun, correct?” she asks, although it sounds more like a statement than a question.

“Do you know who I am?” you ask back. The weapon feels heavy in your hand, and the cold touch of steel is a familiar bite.

“Don’t get cocky,” Moira murmurs darkly. She pulls her gloves off to attach a bracelet-like device around her right wrist, the one where the vein degeneration is at its worst. Your inflated sense of pride stifles the apology on the tip of your tongue and you realize — she has a point. Stop thinking you’re invincible and maybe your own mortality won’t come as a surprise when it comes to take you. “The gun is for self-defense just in case things go awry. You point that thing at an innocent man’s head and I’ll feed you to the Talon dogs myself.”

You click the safety catch into place and slide the handgun into a hidden holster inside your coat. “I think I know the protocol, Moira,” you say, annoyed. A gloating rebuttal forms in the back of your mind but your newfound goal of killing the braggart mindset keeps you from saying anything else. Humility is a learned trait. It’s just a matter of remembering.

The car slows to a stop outside an isolated tattoo parlor that hangs on the border of San Polo, an establishment some ways away from the bustle of the city. It seems odd at first, seeing a place so blatantly ostracized from the rest of the community, but you notice soon enough, just as you step out into the streets, that small-time vendors start to set up shop along the open space; a night market, of some sorts, and a particularly lively one at that. One stall claims a 100% accuracy on their divination. You wonder what they could say about the lines on your palms or the tarot cards you pick or the dregs of your tea or whatever else and what have you. Maybe you’re an anomaly. An outlier. An isolated case of a person with no clear future in a world where destiny rules all.

“Stop ogling. We’re already late,” Moira whisper-snaps at you. The mystic behind the divination stall smiles sadly at you when you pass them by, like they know what’s to come. Perhaps you’re not free from the hand of fate’s cruel grasp, after all.

Inside the parlor resides a lone individual hunched over a basket of blotted needles, shaved head hidden under a black cap and every inch of exposed skin bearing an intricate tattoo depicting either a flaming skull, a hot babe, a hot babe holding a flaming skull, or a flaming skull with the body of a hot babe. His baggy clothes hang loosely off of his lanky body, and when he turns around, you’re almost shocked to see his face completely free of ink. First the tabloids, and now this. Moira can be unpredictable when she wants to be. You’ll take that as a warning.

“Doctor,” the man says in greeting, tipping the visor of his cap. His accent is thick with a Hispanic heritage. “Glad you could make it.”

“We don’t have much time to waste,” she says almost rudely. “I need you to install a mask on her, and n-”

“Wait,” you cut in abruptly. “ _Install?_ ”

“Save it. We have to be at HQ within the hour else they’ll start sending search teams to seek our location. We don’t want to get caught doing this, trust me. Adrian?”

“Just Ian.” The tattoo artist gives you a thumbs up that you think was meant to be reassuring but did little to quell the anxiety that stirs in your stomach. “I’m your guy. Come ‘round to the back with me. I’m not gonna hurt ya.”

Moira stands at the door and gives you the go to follow Ian to the back room. Your hands are shaking ever so slightly from the stress-induced tremors that spread from the back of your head to the tips of your toes. It almost feels like you’re walking into a trap.

“Will it hurt?” you ask out loud, though not directed to anyone in particular. Ian gestures for you to sit on an old dentist’s chair fashioned into a makeshift “installation station” (as the name on the wall opposite you suggests).

“I won’t lie to ya,” he says, almost solemn in his tone. From a long metal chest on the ground underneath what you think is a surgical table, he pulls up three plastic bags, each containing a sleek white mask carved from pure white ivory. “It’s gonna hurt a fuckton. But it’ll only be just a sec or two. Like a pinprick except eightfold. You look like someone who’s taken their share of pinpricks. Shouldn’t be too bad, not too bad at all.”

“And if I don’t consent?” you wonder, leaning back on the tough leather of the dentist’s chair. A waiver magically appears in front of you just as you say it. Spoke too soon. As usual.

“Wouldn’t want to keep Doc out there waiting. She’s a scary one.”

You look through the sheer curtain between rooms and spot Moira’s silhouette standing vigilantly next to the door, quiet as a mouse, still as death. You remind yourself that she’s your only ticket to finding Gabriel, wherever he may be, whatever his state of living is. You sign the waiver reluctantly.

 _By signing this waiver, I, _______________, consent to Adrian Rivera’s professional mask installation and have read and understood the steps of said process._ _  
_ _Rivera’s Tattoo Parlor will not be held liable for any subsequent infection, illness, or death following the mask installation. Client will be provided with the appropriate medicine to maintain the mask’s sanitation and sterility, and is welcome to return to request additional materials._

“Now that that’s out of the way,” Ian says, slotting the document into one of the drawers of his many tables. “You at least get to choose which mask you want to wear.”

He picks up the plastic bags he took out of the chest earlier and starts cycling through them to show you. “Fox, cat, gorgon-” _Gorgon?_ “Wolf. Your choice.”

What the hell. You’re going to go under for some life-altering procedure soon, so you might as well have a little fun with it. “Anything else in that chest of yours?” you ask inquiringly, nodding towards it. “Anything more… avian in nature? Possibly something from the 1300s?”

“Popular request. Sorry to say, but we’re all out,” Ian says regrettably. “But ah, we have one more in there, it’s just not as cool as the others an’ that’s why I left it out. It’s a bird too, if that’s what you were interested in.”

“And that would be?”

“An owl.” He pops the chest open and pulls out the last mask, turning it over in his hands. Admittedly, it _is_ a bit simpler than the others, no ears or detailed carved fur or snake hair; just a regular old barn owl and its wide eyes and narrow beak, framed in a lovingly-carved, almost perfect heart shape.

Owls are wise, right? You like to think of yourself as such, although it’s likely just your ego talking again. Owl it is.

“Owl it is,” you repeat out loud with a noncommittal shrug.

* * *

Waking up after getting eight holes drilled into your skull and replaced by metal screw-in channels feels like waking up post-op. It’s basically a surgical procedure, after all, and you’re slightly comforted by the fact of Adrian Rivera’s PhD displayed proudly on the wall just underneath ‘MASK INSTALLATION STATION’ hand-painted in the classic gothic font you’d find on the cover of an old emo novella or the front page of a newspaper that tries to sell the ‘sophistication’ of their press. How sophisticated can a newspaper be? What a bunch of lies. What a crock of shit.

The anaesthesia is making you a little woozy, you admit.

Surprisingly, the mask fits a lot more comfortably than you expected it to. You reach up to feel the cool ivory surface. Smooth. Cold. Over the eye holes is a small stretch of synthetic fabric that employs the use of hard light to filter in for you to see but block out so they can’t see you. Fully customizable HUD. Maybe you’ll tinker with it later.

“Why didn’t you become like, a real doctor?” you ask drowsily, words slurring. You notice that the mask also serves as a voice filter. It’s funny hearing yourself sound mildly like an omnic with a lower pitch and a more monotone intonation. You wonder how funny it would be if you just kept getting upgrades until you become fully omnic. What will you be then? Omnic? Human? Cyborg? Monster?

“I did,” replies Doctor Rivera, who’s disposing of his bloodied surgical gloves. “I served three decades under the oath. Why do you think Moira and I are friends?”

Figures. This friendship between the two doctors seems a lot less absurd now. “I guess.”

“I’ll go get her. Sit tight.”

He leaves you alone in the little surgical room to reflect. Overhead, the ceiling is composed of one seamless mirror panel to maximize the lighting with as little light source as possible. You see the mask stare back. Your hair splays out on either side of your head that it almost looks like the wings of a barn owl in flight. The hard steel of your pistol digs sharply into your side.

“She’s not to take the mask off for the next twelve hours just to let the incisions heal,” you hear Doctor Rivera’s muffled voice from behind the curtain. “It’s very tender, still. One wrong move and her skull could shatter. You need to let the marrow form around the-”

“I understand completely, Doctor Rivera,” Moira cuts in. “We’re both doctors. I know how this works.”

“I know, Doctor. Just… it seems like she’s been through a lot. A bit reckless, too. You need to watch out for her.”

Moira sighs, one hand already pushing its way through the curtain. “I will.”

You don’t have the energy to say anything when Moira steps inside, but you relish the impressed look on her face even though it’s most likely directed at Doctor Rivera’s handiwork and not particularly at your mere presence. The following pause creates a resounding silence. You leverage yourself up on your elbows and throw your legs over the side of the chair, slowly, shakily getting back to your feet as your body attempts to recover from the surgery.

“Thank you, Doctor Rivera,” you say, bowing politely. He holds out his hand and you shake it without hesitation. Moira stands a little off to the side with her arms folded behind her back.

“We have to go,” she says. Her expression is suddenly unreadable. “Thank you for your time, Doctor Rivera.”

“It’s my pleasure. Give the execs my regards when you arrive.”

“I’m certain they’ll be pleased to hear from you again. Farewell.”

A gentle Moira is as rare as snowfall in July. She leads you back outside by the elbow and you follow through the haze of your drugged up subconscious. The same mystic from earlier sees you and smiles again, their old, wizened eyes crinkling into crow’s feet at the corners.

You feel like you’ve made a mistake, but if it’ll take you anywhere closer to finding Gabriel, then you’d be happy to live the rest of your life as a walking human error.


	6. vi.

You make it to Talon HQ in one piece physically but in a million pieces spiritually. The Talon guards patrolling the outer walls are armed to the teeth with state of the art armor and weaponry, dressed in red-tinted hard light helmets and dark steel armaments. Towering over them, over you, is the armored fortress that Talon calls their bastion; tall, imposing, downright nauseating to look at. Cameras litter the place in the same way you’d done with the main Overwatch base in Gibraltar, except Talon’s cameras still function properly, and the place they’re monitoring is still in regular operations. A row of tanks line up in the parking lot next to the employees’ cars. Further in the distance, the barracks for on-field Talon soldiers is alive with activity.

“Just follow me and don’t say a word,” Moira instructs as you pull up to the tall iron gates. “I’m going to tell them you’re a new recruit for the labs. If we’re separated and they ask any questions about the mask, just say you were in an accident.”

“Understood.” The omnic voice is very entertaining. You can probably listen to yourself speak all day.

She holds her hand out and you see her decaying hand in full display. It’s made even more gruesome by the lack of light to properly illuminate it. The bracelet device around her wrist is hooked up to where her tubes should have been, but what purpose they serve is really out of your world of understanding. Things go still for a moment but when she gives you that _serious_ serious look, you sigh and acquiesce, reaching into your coat to surrender your sidearm.

A flashlight shines into your vehicle as the Talon guard manning the gates comes to do his routine inspection. Moira gives him a small wave.

“Doctor.” The Talon guard salutes and steps back to open the gates. A whirring noise fills the air as the barrier lifts, allowing passage for Moira’s private limo to enter.

“You popular around here already?” you ask.

“Popularity in a place like this is not as glamorous as you might think,” she responds. You pull into an empty parking space in between a 2043 Toyota Avanza and a Russian-engineered battle tank, but Moira gestures for you to follow her before you even get the time to get a good look of it up close. “Remember what I told you.”

“Got it.” You pull your coat tightly around you and step into the night, trailing quietly behind Moira as she leads you through the dim parking lot. Cheers come from the barracks in the distance. It reminds you too much, too often, of Overwatch.

You walk with her in silence as she leads you to an entrance around the back where she goes through a series of advanced security measures; in one small, inconspicuous panel embedded into the steel wall she gets her iris scanned, fingerprint taken, and enters a pincode you estimate to be about thirty digits long before the locked door finally slides open with a conclusive hiss. You’re greeted by a cold, sterile room, and as your eyes adjust to the darkness you make out the columns of squares that line the walls. Bottles of multicolored fluids line up in a neat row on one of the surgical tables. On the other side, a frosted-glass door serves as the barrier between your world and theirs.

A shiver passes through you. “You’re making a real good first impression here by taking me to your morgue,” you tell Moira. “Didn’t think I’d have to deal with the dead again, but here we are.”

“My apologies if it’s not the most optimal of entryways,” she says, and in her voice you hear a tinge of slight sincerity. It’s odd when she does that because you can’t tell if her sincerity is genuine. “The main entrance is far too congested. Less people this way.”

The skin beneath your mask starts to itch and it takes you ten years worth of restraint not to reach in and sate it. Doctor Rivera’s warning echoes in your head. Now, there’s a lot on your plate at the moment, but turning your entire head into a mulch of bone bits and viscera is not exactly in your itinerary. It’s the same feeling as a snarky, passively self-fellating remark under your tongue. Nothing good will come out of trying to satisfy a dangerously fragile temptation.

The halls are empty when you leave the morgue. A special kind of chill runs through your body as you follow Moira through a series of twisting passages, each padded and reinforced hallway growing darker as you progress deeper into their fortress. It’s odd to think that Moira’s laboratory goes even further below the morgue, but if Talon handed her the reigns and the funding to do whatever she pleased, then it really is no wonder that even _they_ would try to hide her cruelty from the prying eyes of the less fortunate.

“Shouldn’t I, like, go through security or something?” you ask as Moira goes through yet another series of fingerprint and iris scans. “Wouldn’t this be considered a breach of government property? I’m basically trespassing.”

“We aren’t government.” Her tone is incredulous. You forget momentarily that Talon isn’t Overwatch. “And no. As long as you follow me, you won’t be in any immediate danger, nor will you be questioned at all, if ever.”

A grim realization dawns on you as you walk through the doors of her lab. You think about Jack who upholds his duty to justice in Moscow. How Moira and her agents had located him for no given reason. How Ana died at the hands of a Talon operative. How Gabriel’s disappearance worries her. A pained groan comes through from behind a plastic curtain and suddenly, quietly, you feel… in danger.

Silence on Moira’s end gives you the impression that she suspects your suspicions, too.

Your voice drops to a low whisper. Again you find solace in the weight of your wrist-mounted blade, but violence is a solution you resort to only when necessary, and with the current state of your freshly-drilled skull you aren’t too keen on putting any strain on yourself until you heal. You aren’t looking to fight. If pacifism is the way of the coward, then you’re not going to let your pride blind you this time.

“Whose side are you on, Moira?” you ask, even if you already know the answer.

The doctor remains silent, still. She stops in the middle of sorting through a keyring she had procured from a drawer in her desk.

“The right decision will come to you as long as you are smart enough to choose it,” she says, unhooking a silver key from the cluster. “You’ll adapt to this new environment in due time.”

“You fucking played me, you dog.”

Her eyes pierce into you with a particular sharpness, and under the dim lights her sickly pallor is made more apparent. “Do you really have any other choice?”

You try to form a rebuttal, but Moira continues without giving you any time to breathe. “Were you really willing to spend the rest of your life locked up in a box, hiding from the world? From war? From reality?” Vitriol lines her words like the fat along a fish’s spine. It’s not often that such levels of negative emotion taint her speech - hearing her patient composure break is always so deeply unsettling. “What use is there in fighting for justice when society continues to breed criminals regardless of how much you try? This is no longer a battle of morality, Commander. There’s no peace left in this world.”

The proceeding silence after her outburst rings in your ears. Moira is correct, to an extent; criminals will always exist no matter how much you try ridding the world of their kind, but the root cause of crime isn’t a natural cruelty, or an inherent evil, or even the desire for chaotic entertainment. It’s the circumstances of a broken world. Everyone is only equal when everyone is dead.

Another moan comes from behind the curtain and Moira turns to inspect the source but not without shoving the silver-plated keycard in your hands first. “Through that door. Second room on the right. I’ll come get you tomorrow so we can sort your papers.” She nods her head towards a doorway behind her plain white desk and leaves without another word.

You sleep restlessly that night on a bed that’s softer than the one in Barbados but firmer than the one in Antigua in a room that’s as plain and unfurnished as a newly constructed home. With the mask on you have to lie supine on your back and you’re once more forced to stare at the ceiling in quiet contemplation. This is your home now. You have no choice.

* * *

It’s about half past 2 in the morning when you wake up in a cold sweat. You can’t tell the exact time, and being so deep into the ground means that you don’t even have the comfort of the night sky as 

You can’t move. _Fuck,_ you knew it was a bad idea lying on your back. Should have at least tried lying on your side. Rumbling waves of anxiety stir in your limbs but you’re immobilized, helpless, completely at the mercy of your nighttime terrors as sleep paralysis roots you to the bed - you screw your eyes shut and focus on breathing before the inevitable feeling of your lungs losing air, but with your vision obscured, the effect of tactile hallucination only grows tenfold. Bugs crawling underneath your mask, into the holes of your screws. Needles piercing into your tongue and teeth and gums. Nails digging into the flesh of your exposed abdomen where your shirt had hiked up in your sleep.

Something slithers underneath your pant legs and your eyes shoot open at the sensation. All the other skin-crawling feelings you’ve already experienced before, to an extent, but the snaking coil around your leg is new. Still unable to move, however, the best you can do in your position is strain your eyes to look downwards at your feet, over the rim of your mask’s eye holes, and for a moment you _swear_ you actually saw something shift underneath the fabric of your pants. It couldn’t be the air; the windows are closed. Can’t be random muscle spasms. Another hallucination, maybe? You can’t tell. Maybe you’re just going mad.

Just out of your peripheral vision, you notice the slight movement of shadows in the corner of the room, like gentle smoke rising in wisps towards the ceiling. A pleasant hallucination at best. You see your own reflection in the waterfall of smog, a pale white blob rising from the pool of darkness, except unlike your own, the one you see in the hallucination is a lot… sharper, in contrast to the gentle roundness of your own. The slithering feeling starts crawling up your leg again.

And the paralysis ends. You’re a little disappointed at the disappearance of the strange mask hallucination.

You stabilize your breathing and let the shaking stop before you close your eyes and attempt to sleep again. This time, it comes easily, surprisingly. The numbing cold lulls you into a slow, sinking slumber. You dream of him.

* * *

The next morning comes as fast as you had fallen asleep.

Moira arrives just as soon as you’re able to find your bearings. You’re still unsure of what her ulterior motives are, seeing as her actions leading up to now have been vaguely intentioned at best; all you can do now is hope that you don’t end up in a coffin - that is if they were generous enough to even give you that much respect. A cursory glance around your surroundings confirms that what you’d witnessed the night prior was simply a product of your hysteria. Your head spins slightly, lightly. Contained, just like how madness should be.

“Read the fine print if you wish, but there’s nothing on it that you don’t already know,” Moira says as she places a thin stack of papers on the empty desk across the room. Lines of disgusting pity line the edges of her face. Around her frame glows a distant purple hue; a side effect of her own self experimentation, a trick of the light, a visual ghost of your morning vertigo.

“Thanks,” you say, then say nothing else, because there really isn’t much left to be said. The doctor spares you another glance before taking her leave. You bite your tongue just to feel something.

Talon’s logo on the employment form takes up almost a third of the sheet. Large and imposing, just like their towering buildings, like their hold over society, like their hold over you. Subtlety doesn’t seem to be their strongest suit, which was especially odd given the nature of their modus operandi.

A path of dust crawls along the sunlight on the floor to the desk. You rub at your eyes and blink away the crusts of sleep, and you feel old, and tired, and spent, and when you feel the smoothness of the paper against the coarseness of your fingertips you are starkly reminded of just how frail life can be. It would be so easy to tear it in two. Like paper, like skin. Frail, but valuable.

Following your best judgment, however, you decide against it and squint through the dizzying stupor, watching as the words in your periphery swim so intensely you’re concerned they’ll start leaking out of the page. An uncomfortable ache prickles at your stomach like white noise - a feeling so distinct, and particular. Hunger. You ignore it and start to read.

The terms of employment under Talon seem to be standard for the most part, and surprisingly reasonable for a world-renowned terrorist organization. A separate sheet of paper deliberates in painful detail the non-disclosure agreement as part of the contract. You’re hesitant for a moment. But the difference between signing your name and throwing the contract away is simply the illusion of choice - you’re soul-bound to work for them whether you like it or not. Where else would you go otherwise? You can’t live on the seaside forever. Enhanced blood is designed for combat. The side effects of such stagnancy had already proven to be… unsavory, at best, so with the stress of deployment and the safety net of Moira and her almost inhuman competence at saving you from the brink of death, you’re guaranteed to last another year or two within the facility. Being generous, that is.

It feels odd, living on borrowed time. Almost like your demise awaits you at every corner. You look around you, eyes straining against the darkness, against the red accents, against the shadows that had haunted your sleep.

Death can wait. There’s a job to be done.

* * *

Spending some time in the Talon facility, you realize that operations here aren’t much different than they were in Overwatch; discounting the stricter security and the overall grim aura that settled in every room, everything else felt… familiar, in a way. Same gray, metal walls. Same crappy cafeteria slop for lunch. Same general feeling of being watched, though this time, _you’re_ on the receiving end of such distant, omniscient scrutiny. You notice the abundance of omnic personnel, too, and by the time noon had fallen over the horizon you were certain the ratio was at least fifty to fifty, human to omnic. Several people had cybernetic augments installed for enhanced performance. It was just like Overwatch, but somehow, more advanced, more competent, more prepared. Almost embarrassingly so. With how Overwatch had been doing prior to its demise, if you were to fight Talon on equal grounds you’re certain the outcome would not have been in your favor.

You would have forgotten that Talon was a terrorist coup if it weren’t for the constant reminder of their brutality by martial means. Every single person, regardless of their rank, was armed to the teeth, armored like knights, and held themselves like kings - it was as if the concept of confidence made itself manifest in the form of a global-scale bastion of power and strength, and you were somehow caught right in the middle of its tornado of terror, right in the eye of the storm. At least you fit right in. No one spared even the smallest of glances in your direction.

“Try not to be too intimidated,” Moira tells you during lunch as kevlared soldiers swarm around you like insects. She pokes a fork at her salad and scowls as a man nudges into her shoulder with his hip. “Some soldiers tend to get cocky, and it’s that overconfidence that ultimately fells them in battle. We’re trying to work on our dismal mortality rate, but with the way things work here I doubt it will ever improve.”

“You act as if I haven’t been in this industry for over thirty years,” you respond. “No greater danger than to underestimate your opponent. I have it tattooed on my back.”

“Along with other garish, obtrusive decorative words of wisdom, I assume?”

“No. Just that and my husband’s initials.” (You feel kind of bad about lying, but your tattoos aren’t any of her business.)

“Hmm.” She stabs at a cherry tomato. You slip your metal straw through the slit under your mask’s beak and drink what Moira prescribes as her “cure-all solution”, which is basically just an appetite suppressing protein shake that tastes as good as it looks; pink and tart like strawberries, although it leaves a strange, blooming texture on the back of your tongue that you can only describe as sharp but not particularly painful. Like hot whiskey, or some form of citrus. Nonetheless, your body accepts it as what it was meant to be - a meal substitute, and you’re both pleasantly surprised and mildly concerned about this new development; for the sake of discretion, the government had kept the more savory secrets of the Soldier Enhancement Program under confidentiality, so the process of producing the serum and anything outside of its immediate effects are unknown, even for those who’d undergone it. Unfortunately, such secrets include just exactly how long it’s supposed to last in a soldier’s body - what you’re sure of is that it was introduced into you in sessions over the course of several months, and that not everyone had the physical integrity to withstand its power. Many of your friends died during the experimentation phase. That’s one secret you’re intent on keeping to yourself forever.

Now, you won’t doubt the capability of the government’s science and tech R&D department. They have good people working there, even if the people they work for aren’t, plus they have the funds to drop on large-scale projects like this; but something in the back of your mind tells you that maybe, just maybe, the serum’s effects are starting to wane. Pain suppression was one of the effects of it; somehow they’d managed to chemically trick the body into staggering the damage in combat, and instead of taking the full brunt of an enemy’s blow, the body numbs itself and exhausts the stored-up energy later. You learned in a conference call that they’d decided against total bodily desensitization to improve efficiency; the first time they had tried such a tactic resulted in the loss of nearly twenty troops due to their bodies succumbing to the accumulated ball of pure physical distress hours after the battle was over. A friend of yours was one of the casualties. Owen, his name was. _Is_.

Lately, however, you’ve noticed that your body was lagging behind with the aforementioned ability, some moments even completely disappearing in times where you were certain it would kick in. Like when you once burnt yourself on a fresh hill of cigarette ashes, or that time you’d punched a wall out of frustration and the sting of its impact rang painfully in your knuckles for hours. Bruises now appear in places you didn’t even know could bruise. The pain you once ignored for years is starting to wear at the skin. The pain is now constant, and your body has lost the capability to bypass it.

Perhaps it isn’t at all too bad. The effect extends past just the pain, after all.

Lunch hour ends and the soldiers filter out through the doors like a stream of rowdy, noisy schoolchildren. Moira eats another forkful of lettuce and tomato before packing her unfinished salad back in her bag. You take another sip of your drink.

“I’ll be busy the rest of the day, so take this time to tour the facility on your own, since you need to get those legs back in shape if you want a place here as one of our agents,” she tells you casually as she rises from her seat. “Just… use your intuition. If you find a door with keep out signs on it, I suggest you heed its warning.”

“Got it.” You pull your hood over your head and tuck your tumbler under your arm. “Stop treating me like a child. I have self restraint.”

“Just supervising. Simple as.” Moira shoulders her bag and turns to leave, gesturing for you to follow. “Oh, and try not to talk to anybody. I’ve told them you’re under my care. They won’t bother you.”

She accompanies you as you leave the cafeteria, and stops at a hallway that you hadn’t noticed was there the first time you passed it by. It seems that this is where you part, and you do so with nothing but a nod of acknowledgment.

You’re left alone in the atrium of the establishment, a large, circular dome with high ceilings and several hallways leading to different wings. Scarce is the presence of people here, as most are off working or training, but some staff come in and out, all in a rush. It all still feels like Overwatch, and it’s like you never left, nor did it ever disband in the way that it did. A sense of remembrance washes over you, almost melancholy in its passing. During your stagnancy you’ve spent many an hour in deep contemplation, thinking upon the what-ifs of the past, and it always left you with a distasteful ache in your chest - the same feeling twists in your gut now as you stand in the middle of the main hub like a lost child, a wandering soul. A ghost of your own past.

Whatever this place is, no matter how much of a reflection it is of your old home, you cement the fact that it’s not Overwatch, and that it never will be. Not without them. Not without the family you’ve built.


End file.
